ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
The transformation of the NRC: 50 years of commissioners
The dust is beginning to settle following the whirlwind of changes at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over the past year, and 2025 ultimately may be viewed as a transformative year, as well as the year the NRC celebrated its golden anniversary. The 12 months of that milestone year brought more change to the agency in its composition, its mandate, and its relationship to the executive branch than any comparable period in the preceding four decades.
Now at 51 years and counting, the NRC is working with a full commission and issuing new rulemakings to both regulate and support the next round of nuclear deployments. With the turbulence of 2025 still fresh in our minds, Nuclear News decided it was a good time to revisit the professional backgrounds of all 42 NRC commissioners who have served over the agency’s 50-year history to see how the composition of the commission has evolved over time.
Yoshitaka Ueki, Yuta Aoki, Naoya Maeda, Noriyuki Unno, Kazuhisa Yuki, Yohji Seki, Shin-ichi Satake
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 82 | Number 1 | January-February 2026 | Pages 212-220
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2024.2435193
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the cooling systems of a nuclear fusion reactor (NFR), anomaly events may occur where the flow of coolant unexpectedly decreases, such as in a loss-of-flow accident (LOFA). From the viewpoint of reactor safety design, ITER should be capable of handling subcooled boiling in coolant duct lines due to a sudden LOFA under severe operating conditions where the reactor’s divertor is under a steady-state massive heat load of 10 . To detect anomaly events, we performed a proof-of-concept (PoC) experiment and propose a novel method of state sensing of the coolant duct line based on sound emitted from boiling. In the PoC pool boiling experiment, using a hydrophone, we acquired sound from water boiling where the heat transfer surface was made of a divertor alloy [copper-chromium-zirconium (CuCrZr)] or copper (Cu) as the reference material. Notably, microbubble emission boiling (MEB) occurred at the highest heat flux in the case of CuCrZr alloy as well as Cu. This indicates that MEB can also occur in an actual NFR. In this study, we developed deep neural network (DNN) models to identify boiling states from acquired sound. Our well-trained DNN models could distinguish between the boiling sound of Cu and the CuCrZr alloy of the heat transfer surface material. The regression DNN models achieved a coefficient of determination of approximately 99%. Based on the PoC study, we have demonstrated that DNN models of boiling acoustics have the potential to identify boiling states inside coolant duct lines in the NFR, where the heat flux ranges from the low region to the high region with MEB occurrence.